USDA's recently updated chart of the growth of the adoption of GM crops in the US

Regardless of consumers' wariness of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), thanks to a lack of labelling (not to mention testing and regulating), more and more GMOs are being planted by US farmers and entering the food supply (or in the case of cotton, clothing supply).

This USDA chart shows the percentage of planted acres grown that are GMO (it includes Ht soybeans, Ht corn, Bt corn, Ht cotton and Bt cotton). Here's another look at it. It's hard to believe that over 90% of all soybeans grown in the US are now genetically modified.

Farming in the news

Grist had a decent short article this past week on the United States' urgent need for more farmers. Farmers make up 1.6 percent of the US population right now, and onlyy 5.8 percent of those farmers are under the age of 35. Richard Heinberg addressed the same issue around a year and a half ago in one of his Museletters taken from a lecture he delivered to the E.F. Schumacher Society. The situation is no doubt pretty much the same in Canada, and with food shortages becoming more and more of a concern, and as the need for less oil-reliant agriculture continues to grow as we run out of fossil fuels, we can expect to hear about this a lot more.

The USDA has recently decided to eliminate a program used by everyone from environmental groups to industry and trade groups to trace the use and risk of pesticides. Scaled back in 2007, the collection and analysis of data on food crop pesticide usage in the US was regarded as the only ''reliable, plublicly searchable database of its kind'', according to an article in The Daily Green, which also points out that this comes at a time when herbicide use in Monsanto's near-monopoly of Roundup Ready crops has been increasing.